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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

They are a 3 year old startup raising a series C round. Profitability isn’t a concern, and won’t be for a long time.

That thinking is going to die pretty soon. Unless you’re building the groundbreaking foundations that requires heavy capital profitability is going to be a huge concern and soon - but that’s just one undercapitalized man’s opinion :)

Also - profitability or margin makes a big difference. Most folks are capable of selling $2B for $1B. Obviously not the case here if they’re doing 500M on a 400M raise, but you get the point.

It won't be, until either the runway or the economic cycle end, whichever comes first.

Presumably they'll aim for IPO or getting acquihired before then. Most startups these days aren't meant to build anything lasting, they're designed to line up an exit from day zero. It's an established, mature business model now.

The whole business model is poisonous and extractive. 90% of the businesses launched aren't valid, and then the few that are get bought up by oligopolists/monopolists.

I'd bet on them. Brand and models will get cheaper. Can engineer to use cheaper open models. Secret sauce can be in that context engineering and becoming a "cloud" themselves to get cheaper inference.

How is that different than literally any other SaaS raising big rounds? Profitability is apparently only important for AI companies, and even being more profitable than most SV startups since the inception of this site is not good enough.

Regular SaaS businesses are not capital intensive once launched, they're mostly pure software plays. Their marginal user cost trends towards 0.

This stuff isn't hard if you keep an open mind.

Oh, so they’re a machine for setting money on fire and they shouldn’t care about changing that for a few more years and a few more raises. Got it.

Do you have any idea what forum you are on? It's made by a VC company, this is just how startups work.

I know, it’s still funny to me after all the years here. It works for some and doesn’t for others and it always looks insane from the outside before it works.

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